Review: A TWENTY MINUTE SILENCE FOLLOWED BY APPLAUSE by Shawn Wen
If Marcel Marceau as a performer and a French man was cheeky, brilliant, and impossible, it seems no accident the title of Wen’s book-length essay is what it is.
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Sight Lines: An Interview with Poet Sandra Marchetti
Sandra Marchetti is the author of Confluence, a collection of poetry from Sundress Publications (2015). She’s also written four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays, and she is a lecturer in interdisciplinary studies at Aurora University near Chicago. I interviewed her about her latest chapbook, Sight Lines.
On the Art of Perspective: Christopher Castellani & Maggie Nelson
“I want to tell you what happened on the way to dinner.” Christopher Castellani‘s The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story begins with that simple phrase, the driving force of storytelling: the author has something they want to convey. Which quickly leads us to the issue of how to convey it. Castellani, a Ploughshares…
Nonfiction | Poetry | Series | Writing | Writing Advice
Notes on the State of Virginia: Journey to the Center of an American Document, Queries IV and V
This is the third installment of a year-long journey through Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. You can read previous installments here and here. ** Query IV: A notice of its mountains Query V: Its cascades and caverns I walked into Queries IV and V thinking Jefferson would use these sections to acknowledge…
Reconstruction: How the Lyric Essay Rendered One Body After Trauma
1. I didn’t start writing lyric essays until I found out I had cancer. The melanoma buried in my right cheek was at first missed, and then misdiagnosed in its severity. Clark’s stage IV, they told me. Likely in my lymph nodes, but they wouldn’t know until my third surgery, the excision and biopsy. 2….
Book Reviews | Poetry | Reading | Writing
“Sometimes she is a space” : Janice Lee’s Reconsolidation: Or, It’s the ghosts who will answer you
Taking up the mantel of memory and elegy is no easy task, but Janice Lee’s new book Reconsolidation: Or, it’s the ghosts who will answer you embraces the ghosts. The text is not so much a reflection on writing, loss, memory, and death, but a twisted projection of those topics. The medium is under as…
Inclusivity & Authorship: Second-Person Pronouns
Used poorly, second-person reads like a trope; used well, second-person as a narrative device adds inclusivity to literature, raises questions of authorship, and helps an author communicate politically-charged topics like globalization, race, and gender. Mohsin Hamid utilizes second-person in his novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, a tongue-in-cheek how-to for globalization. The…
Impossible to Pin Down: Truth & Memory in Nonfiction
Nonfiction as a genre confronts the discordance between memory—a slippery, subjective entity that can be the antithesis of truth—and actuality. Roy Peter Clark writes of the “essential fictive nature of all memory.” Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, editors of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, write “of…